By Alon Ben-Meir*
NEW YORK | 29 January 2026 (IDN) — The horror of the Sudanese civil war is not exhausted by the enumeration of its atrocities. However, those alone are staggering: mass killings, ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, the razing of villages, famine used as a weapon, and the deliberate destruction of the conditions of life.
What distinguishes Sudan’s catastrophe—stretching from earlier civil wars through Darfur and into the present conflict between rival military powers—is not only the scale of suffering, but the way violence has become structural, embedded in the very organization of political power. The war is not merely a breakdown of order; it is the triumph of a particular conception of order itself.
At the centre lies a grim philosophical insight: when power is divorced from accountability, violence ceases to be instrumental and becomes expressive. In Sudan, armed actors—whether state forces or militias—do not simply commit atrocities; they do so in pursuit of clear political ends.
Violence itself becomes the message.
The Collapse of Civilian Protection
One of the central principles of just war theory is discrimination: combatants may be targeted; civilians must not. In Sudan, this distinction has broken down. Markets, funeral homes, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps—all civilian spaces—have been repeatedly attacked. Drone strikes on gatherings such as funerals and children in homes exemplify indiscriminate violence that fails to distinguish between combatant and non-combatant.
This moral and military failure signifies a war that treats human beings as interchangeable obstacles rather than as persons with intrinsic dignity. The burning of villages, the targeting of civilians, and the erasure of entire communities are not accidental excesses; they are ways of asserting dominance in a space where legitimacy no longer matters.
Starvation and the denial of humanitarian access become weapons to coerce compliance. The displacement of entire populations and casualty counts serve as justifications for further escalation.
The Moral Breakdown of Power
This instrumental logic corrodes moral agency. The victims are no longer persons whose rights must be respected, but strategic variables in an intermittent game of gain and loss. Power announces itself through terror because terror is the only remaining currency. Instead of protecting civilians in Sudan, we witness an ethical inversion.
The very actors claiming to secure territorial or political ends are the ones perpetuating harm to the basic conditions of life—safety, nourishment, shelter, health, and growth. Extrajudicial killings, rape, and mass displacement are not accidental by-products. They are recurring, patterned actions in the conflict that signal the erosion of moral defence.
Means Become Ends
This is why the Sudanese civil war resists comforting narratives of tragedy or misunderstanding. What we see instead is the collapse of the distinction between means and ends, as Hannah Arendt once described it. The prospect of future peace no longer justifies killing; killing itself becomes a political practice.
The result is a form of nihilism that is not abstract but brutally material—the reduction of human beings to obstacles, resources, or threats to be eliminated.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Darfur, where ethnic identity became a death sentence and entire populations were murdered. This marks the annihilation of the idea of a shared world, because recognizing another as human is to acknowledge their right to inhabit the same moral space—and that their suffering makes a claim on us.
Genocidal Logic and the Emptiness of Sovereignty
Genocidal violence is not simply murder; it is the denial that the victim ever counted as a bearer of meaning or value. The current phase of the war—marked by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—deepens this horror by exposing the emptiness at the heart of militarized sovereignty.
These factions represent rival monopolies on coercion. Civilians are crushed not because they obstruct a noble project, but because their lives are irrelevant to the calculus of power. This is domination stripped of even the pretense of ideology.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Sudan poses a terrifying question: what remains of ethics when the political sphere becomes an arena of total irresponsibility? In such conditions, guilt is diffused, accountability evaporates, and atrocity becomes trite. Violence no longer shocks; it normalizes itself.
This is perhaps the most insidious horror of all—not that human beings are capable of cruelty, but that cruelty can become routine, administered, and legitimized by identity, faction, or territory. Stories of atrocities are reported but often overshadowed by geopolitics. The innocent become instruments, not ends.
Several countries supplying warring parties with weapons are complicit in Sudan’s calamity. The SAF receives support from Iran, Egypt, and Russia, while the RSF is armed primarily by the UAE; weapons manufactured in China, Russia, Turkey, and Serbia have been documented in the conflict.
Instead of fueling a war neither side can win, external actors—especially Turkey and the UAE—should prioritize mediation. Failing that, the UN Security Council must act decisively: expand the arms embargo, impose economic and secondary sanctions, freeze assets, enforce travel bans, and pursue international investigations.
To confront Sudan honestly is to abandon the illusion that history bends automatically toward justice. Without institutions capable of responsibility, power tends toward annihilation. The Sudanese civil war is a warning written in blood.
*Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at NYU’s Centre for Global Affairs. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [IDN-InDepthNews]